ZEBRAFISH AS ECOTOXICITY SENSOR: ASSESSMENT OF ENVIRONMENTAL POLLUTANTS

摘要

The use offish embryos is not regulated by current legislations on animal welfare and is therefore considered as a refinement, if not replacement of animal experiments. Fish embryos represent an attractive model for environmental risk assessment of chemicals since they offer the possibility to perform small-scale and high-throughput analyses.Zebrafish Danio ratio embryo is an emerging toxicity screening model for both human health and ecology. It is a suitable experimental organism in toxicological research due to its short spawning intervals, easily manipulation and adaptation to the laboratory setting, rapid development and generation time, transparent eggs and can be maintained in a relatively small space facilitating visual identification of morphogenetic movements and organogenesis with a standard dissecting microscope. Embryos of zebrafish have often been used in toxicity studies of environmentally relevant substances.